Inside X’s New Location Reveal: How a Small Button Sparked a Global Hunt for Hidden Identities

November 25, 2025 - When Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, quietly unveiled a new feature over the weekend, he framed it as a simple transparency upgrade. “You can now see the country or region where an account is based,” he wrote on the platform, calling it “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.”

Within hours, that small addition (a tiny location tag on user profile) had detonated into one of the most intense waves of online sleuthing X has seen in years. What began as a product tweak quickly transformed into a global exercise in digital forensics.

Users scoured profiles, cross-checked identities, and shared screenshots of accounts whose locations didn’t match the personas they projected. Some appeared to be influencers who had amassed massive followings under one identity, only for their account region to reveal something entirely different. And just like that, the world had a new window into how online influence really works.

A Feature With outsized Impact

X designed the feature to expose inauthentic behaviour. This targets accounts posing as something they’re not or networks trying to seed narratives across countries. But its impact was immediate and far-reaching because, for the first time, users could pair behavioural anomalies with an apparent geographic origin.

Researchers had suspected overseas networks were influencing online conversations for years, but they relied on subtle clues: timestamp patterns, language irregularities, image reuse, technical artefacts in posts.

Now, they had something concrete. “Before this change we could show these profiles were fake, but we had almost no visibility on where they were run from,” says Benjamin Strick, director of investigations at the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR). “Now we can see many of the accounts in this network are linked to Southeast Asia.”

But transparency comes with risk